The primary aim of this thesis has been to describe the complex influences governing the production of fashionable furniture in C18th England and France in order to reassess the connection between material practices, the cultures in which they reside and the philosophical ideas from which they emerge. This has been achieved by detailing the factors influencing the design and production of late C18th furniture in England and France and developing a comparative model developed around the Harewood Library Table by Thomas Chippendale and The Wallace Collection F302 Secrétaire á abattant by Riesener, in order to isolate, identify and interpret differences between them. This innovative case study sits at the heart of this thesis and describes in detail how these pieces were designed and constructed and how they relate to the wider cultures from which they emerged. The result of this is apparent in a number of outcomes. Firstly, the thesis offers a definitive summary of the key characteristics of Chippendale’s and Riesener’s work which will better enable practitioners (conservators, curators, collectors, etc.) to identify pieces made by these makers, analyze their condition and help conserve these important pieces of furniture: furniture history currently is over‐dependent on much more subjective approaches to this process of identification. Secondly, the thesis examines different aspects of furniture making in England and France (literature on the workshops, information on economic conditions, evidence relating to tools and materials etc.) and integrates them in such a way as to provide an authoritative account of the complex processes involved in the commissioning of such fashionable furniture. The thesis not only helps us better understand furniture making in England and France at a structural level during this key period of transition but also provides an original and systematic approach to writing a history around such material cultures, demonstrating how important it is to the full(est) comprehension of history that such fashionable objects be understood. Where other frequently more privileged objects (written documents, paintings and sculptures etc.) have been seen to provide valuable historical insights, this thesis argues that fashionable furniture can now be seen to provide its own unique perspectives on the time and on the society in which it was created.

This thesis explores the implications of chinoiserie, or Western creations of Chinese-style decorative arts, upon an eighteenth century colonial American audience. Chinese products such as tea, porcelain, and silk, and goods such as furniture and wallpaper displaying Chinese motifs of distant exotic lands, had become popular commodities in Europe by the eighteenth century. The American colonists, who were primarily culturally British, thus developed a taste for chinoiserie fashions and wares via their European heritage. While most European countries had direct access to the China trade, colonial Americans were banned from any direct contact with the Orient by the British East India Company. They were relegated to creating their own versions of these popular designs and products based on their own interpretations of British imports. Americans also created a mental construct of China from philosophical writings of their European contemporaries, such as Voltaire, who often envisioned China as a philosopher's paradise. Some colonial Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, fit their understanding of China within their own Enlightenment worldview. For these individuals, chinoiserie in American homes not only reflected the owners' desires to keep up with European fashions, but also carried associations with Enlightenment thought. The latter half of the eighteenth century was a time of escalating conflict as Americans colonists began to assert the right to govern themselves. Part of their struggle for freedom from England was a desire to rid themselves of the British imports, such as tea, silk, and porcelain, on which they had become so dependent by making those goods themselves. Americans in the eighteenth century had many of the natural resources to create such products, but often lacked the skill or equipment for turning their raw materials into finished goods. This thesis examines the colonists' attempts to create their own chinoiserie products, despite these odds, in light of revolutionary sentiments of the day. Chinoiserie in colonial America meshed with neoclassical décor, thereby reflecting the Enlightenment and revolutionary spirit of the time, and revealing a complex colonial worldview filled with trans-oceanic dialogues and cross-cultural currents.

Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.